… Although it’s not for lack of trying, as Ryan Bombergerhas chronicled. Northern California is a liberal bastion, which, of course, includes the press. This CBS5 news piece calling the billboards “blatantly racist” was yanked after Ryan complained on Twitterabout the obvious bias and absence of corroboration. (Explain again how “Black & Beautiful is racist?)…

Neverthless, as black pro-life leader Walter Hoye said in the above news pieces, any conversation about black abortion genocide is good. Hoye wrote on Facebook:

It has been said that one can be judged by the strength of his or her enemies. If this old adage is true and we consider those assembled against us (i.e., Congresswoman and former Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Barbara Lee, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, theCalifornia NAACP, Trust Black Women of California, Black Women For Wellness, Black Entertainment Television, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union), then by that standard alone our billboard campaign is formidable and by God’s grace and mercy is having the impact desired as a result of communicating His timeless truth of love and life in the public square (John 8:32).

Amen!

The people need to know. It’s bad, very bad, as Alveda King tweeted only today (linking back to a post on my blog by Dr. Gerard Nadal)…

Activists Fail to Censor Oakland Black Abortion Billboards

“Pro-abortion activists have failed in their bid to take down pro-life billboards in Oakland, California that point to how abortion disproportionately affects the African-American community.

A series of billboards that highlight the ways in which abortion and the abortion industry target black Americans, sponsored by the Ryan Bomberger-led Radiance Foundation and black pro-life pastor Walter Hoye, feature the phrase “Black and Beautiful.” The billboards, which have run in states like Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, Wisconsin and elsewhere are placed throughout Oakland. They appeared in Los Angeles earlier this year.

The two African-American pro-life advocates say the campaign comes on the anniversary of legalized abortion in California through the Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967. That year, there were 518 legal abortions but, today, California is the nation’s abortion capital with over 214,190 abortions performed each year at the numerous abortion businesses throughout the Golden State. Bomberger and Hoye say the CDC reports that the black abortion rate is over three times that of the majority population — differences which cannot be explained by “health care disparities.”

However, pro-abortion activists pressured CBS Outdoor General Manager Jeff McCuen to remove the 60 billboards. Congresswoman Barbara Lee helped lead the effort and she condemned the pro-life celebration of African-American babies by saying, “I am deeply offended by the race-based billboards that are being displayed in my congressional district. These billboards stigmatize women of color and perpetuate myths about parenting skills and the types of women who seek and use abortion services.”

Asian Reproductive Rights, the California chapter of Trust Black Women, and Black Women For Wellness joined the pressure effort, according to East Bay Express. However, McCuen told Eveline Shen, Executive Director of Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice that they would not come down.

“The Radiance ads are within the standards we apply to all submissions, and we would apply those same standards in deciding whether to accept an ad presenting an opposing viewpoint,” McCuen wrote, according to the newspaper. “At the end of the day we have faith in the public’s ability to use their judgment with regard to the issues involved in this debate.”

Hoye and Bomberger say the billboards have received a positive response, with Hoye saying, “I’m pleased with all the coverage we’ve gotten.”

“It’s hard to look at a billboard that says black and beautiful and say that that’s a racist statement,” Bomberger added. “Especially when abortion is destroying the Black community.”

“The impact of abortion in the Black Community is the Darfur of America,” Hoye declared, citing the 15 million abortions on black unborn children since 1973 that he says have crippled the black community.

Bomberger, who created the TooManyAborted.Com campaign and is an adoptee and adoptive father, chimed in, saying, “Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain, is a failure. They haven’t budged the national unintended pregnancy rate since 1995 but are relentlessly dedicated to increasing their annual share of abortions. They heavily advocate a singular ‘choice’ that feeds their $1 billion dollar tax-payer subsidized budget.”

La Verne Tolbert, Ph.D., a former Board Member of Planned Parenthood, applauded the new billboards and said they are needed to expose the Planned Parenthood abortion agenda and how it targets minority communities and works through the education system to do so.

“In California, children are targeted for abortions through school-based clinics and school-linked clinics, which are family planning clinics on or near school grounds,” Tolbert explained. “Girls are taken off campus to a Planned Parenthood clinic, where abortions are performed without parental consent or notification.”

Bomberger, who was, as a child, transracially adopted into a multi-racial family of 15 people and who is now an adoptive father, told LifeNews.com: “Taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood aborted 324,008 innocent lives and only made 2,405 adoption referrals according to their own latest Annual Report; that’s 135 children killed for every 1 adoption referral.”

In fact, the CDC report from February shows black women accounted for 34.4 percent of all abortions in the United States despite comprising a much lower percentage of the population as a whole. The federal health agency showed black women had the highest abortion rates (32.1 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years) and ratios (480 abortions per 1,000 live births).

In Georgia in 2006, 57.4 percent of abortions in Georgia are performed on African-American women even though blacks comprise just 30 percent of the general population.

In Texas, abortions on black women comprise nearly 25% of all state abortions even though they only constitute 12.7% of the female population (ages 15-44). Every other racial demographic shares a smaller percentage of statewide abortions than their respective percentage of total population.

ACTION: Support the billboards by emailing jeff.mccuen@cbsoutdoor.com, calling (510) 559-1135 or (510) 527-3350 and emailing patrick.roche@cbsoutdoor.com, sljacobs@cbs.com, and jodi.senese@cbsoutdoor.com”

Controversy over the Black and Beautiful billboards in Oakland is covered here by SFGate. The author is definitely biased toward the pro-choice camp as she attempts to rally against CBS Outdoors, the owners of the billboards.

Abortion billboards divide and distract by SFGate

Controversy over the ‘pro-LIFE’ billboards in Oakland have created a lot of dialogue about abortions in the Black community.

Belle Taylor-McGhee

Monday, June 27, 2011

Michelle Terris / The Chronicle

“Belle Taylor-McGhee wants the anti-abortion signs in Oakland removed. The signs are mapped at sfg.ly/jF4ikD.

“The Bay Area now has its own taste of the offensive billboards sponsored by anti-abortion groups that target African American women. Earlier this month, dozens of billboards went up around Oakland that read “Black & Beautiful” and are anchored to an anti-abortion website: toomanyaborted.com/ca. These billboards place African American women at the center of a propaganda campaign over a basic health care procedure that is both legal and safe, while ignoring the realities of the barriers the black community faces in health access and outcomes.

Abortion opponents have put up similar billboards across the United States in a multimillion-dollar campaign, mostly in cities with a large black population – including New York and Atlanta. And African Americans are not the only targets. Bilingual billboards in Los Angeles targeting Latinas recently went up, some of which quickly came down because of community pressure.

But the issue isn’t really where abortion opponents place their billboards – it’s what they hope to gain. First and foremost, abortion opponents want to make abortion illegal – and are hoping these billboards will persuade more African Americans to support their goal. Secondly, they purport to claim some moral authority over black women’s private medical decision making about childbearing.

As an African American woman, I find the billboard campaign both racist and offensive: racist because it singles out a group of people – black women. And offensive because it dares to insinuate that black women are not intelligent enough to decide for themselves what is best for them and their families. I frankly don’t know of any black woman who consults the Radiance Foundation or Issues4Life Foundation – groups behind the billboards – when she is making a decision about whether or when to have a child.

African Americans cannot afford to be divided and distracted by salacious billboards that exploit black children and insult black women. The truth is that poor black women have historically had less access to affordable health services such as birth control than any other ethnic group. This access gap leads to greater health disparities, including more unintended pregnancies.

These billboards – and the money spent to fund them – do nothing to address health disparities that harm our community. Instead, they divert our attention from the economic and political barriers that result in poor health for black women and their families. We must stay focused on the policy debates that undermine access to family planning services for poor women, including access to government safety nets that abortion opponents are working hard to defund – such as the Title X program, the only federal grant program dedicated solely to family planning.

Recent national research commissioned by the Ford Foundation on behalf of Trust Black Women, a national partnership of African American women in support of black women’s reproductive autonomy, shows that the majority of African Americans support increased access to contraception and comprehensive sex education. This research also shows that, at the end of the day, most African Americans trust black women to make their own decisions about childbearing.

Reproductive justice advocates in the Oakland area are getting that message out to the billboard owners, CBS Outdoor. We are demanding that the billboards come down – activating an online petition drive starting today. Meanwhile, we’ve secured the support of elected officials, including Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, and Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who will stand with us and not cave in when our health and lives are on the line.

Belle Taylor-McGhee is national communications chair for Trust Black Women and a longtime women’s health advocate in San Francisco.

On June 18th, I attended a press conference hosted by Walter Hoye, founder of Issues4LIFE Foundation about the Black & Beautiful billboards in Oakland. Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of The Radiance Foundation, Christina Marie Martin, a writer for Moral Outcry, a Bound4LIFE chapter leader in Atlanta and a part of National Black Pro-life Coalition, Catherine Davis legislative director of Network of Politically Active Christians and National Black Pro-life Coalition were the speakers for the conference. Major local news outlets covered the press conference; KGO 7 coverage and KTVU 2 coverage and CBS 5 coverage. Walter Hoye reports that CBS 5 aired one message the first night of coverage and replaced it with a “non-biased” piece.

“Pastors: Here is the new CBS 5 video that replaced their original coverage. CBS feels this is non-biased coverage. Brothers, we need to talk.” Walter Hoye

“TooManyAborted -Entertainment truly is the opiate of the people. There’s an epidemic of abortion, fatherlessness, poverty and soaring STD/HIV infection rates, and this is the best BET can do to illuminate abortion’s devastating impact in the black community? As a black adoptee and adoptive father, I created the TooManyAborted.com campaign to expose Planned Parenthood and emphasize life-affirming solutions to unplanned pregnancies.

Black babies are aborted at 3 to 5 times that of the majority population, and “lack of access” and “healthcare disparities” do not explain or justify this. Abortion IS the disparity. The same racist ideology that launched Planned Parenthood, that infused social policies like Jim Crow Laws, still exists today. But BET is too busy wading in the cesspool of much of today’s “entertainment” to be bothered with this destruction.

There is a crisis in the black community and silence isn’t solving anything. In NYC, more black babies are aborted than born (60% of black pregnancies end in abortion). The Radiance Foundation’s site, TooManyAborted.com DOES provide the verification, contrary to Mr. McCoy’s assertion. These tragic stats are directly from NYC State Dept of Health: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/vs/vs.shtml
Abortion affects all of us. Mr. Shelton’s comments about our ATLANTA “Juneteenth” campaign reveals not only his ignorance about the issue, but about slavery and civil rights history. The NAACP has failed the black community and grows increasingly irrelevant. Their continued advocacy of abortion (back in 2004, they publicly endorsed–for the first time– a pro-abortion march in DC, “March for Women’s Lives”) belies their role as the nation’s largest civil rights organization. They have ignored the plight of the most defenseless and most disenfranchised among us–the unborn. This is not just a woman’s issue. It’s a human issue…a justice issue.

The Nat’l Association for the Abortion of Colored People has lost its place of authority. Period. They’re more concerned about glaucoma than 15 million beautiful black babies destroyed since 1973 by the nation’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood, and abortion mills that have targeted the black community since abortion was legalized.

Wake up. The epidemic is killing our future, one innocent life at a time. We can no longer be silent.

Ryan Bomberger
The Radiance Foundation
TooManyAborted.com”

Christina Marie Martin wrote about her perspective of the press conference in Moral Outcry.

Walter Hoye reports an apology from CBS, “Pastors: Here is the CBS5 Tweet apologizing for calling our “Black & Beautiful” billboard campaign in Oakland “Blatantly Racist.” – FROM: (@cbs5) 6/23/11 2:00 P.M. TO: @lifehaspurpose – “Our apologies. We wrote this with attribution but inadvertently phrased it wrong on air. You are right to call us on it!” This is why CBS pulled the video off their website. Brothers, we need to talk.”

Rev. Walter Hoye reports that The Black and Beautiful billboards have been mapped on google maps.

Walter Hoye comments on the maps on Google, “Pastors: The forces against our billboards in Oakland are actively mapping their locations. Apparently, allowing the pro-abortion community to advocate for the removal of our billboards (via Op-Ed) and in deference to our side report only on the billboards coming down is a form of journalistic integrity. Still, I believe the prayers of the righteous availeth much (James 5:16). Please pray. Brothers, we need to talk.” Walter Hoye

God has apprehended my heart for the African-American community for a long time, but now the yearning for justice is burning in my heart more than ever. After the press conference, a documentary called Maafa 21 was shown. Maafa 21 is a two hour documentary concerning the eugenics roots of Planned Parenthood and abortion in general. Maafa 21 was hard to watch, just as Schlinder’s list was difficult to sit through, but it was worth every minute. Maafa 21 revealed the forced sterilization of the Black community here in America as recent as 1983. Children as young as two years of age were sterilized to prevent the “feeble-minded” race to breed. A woman who was sterilized at age 13 because she was raped by a neighbor told her story in this revealing piece. In order to understand the complexities of the issues of abortion and race, Maafa 21 is a must see.

Let thousands of William Wilberforces cry out for justice and mercy! Messengers who truly see and carry God’s heart for deliverance! Let the Rosa Parks stand up and say, “No more! Not on my watch! No more of my people will die for a lie! Let my people go!” Let the abortionists wake up from their stupor like John Newton, the infamous slave trader who in repentance wrote the hauntingly beautiful hymn, “Amazing Grace”! Let the eyes of the modern day John Newtons be open to see the beauty of the pre-born! Let us all work together to see the end to abortion in America!

“I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common, indeed, with the whole parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty—we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others; and I therefore deprecate every kind of reflection against the various descriptions of people who are more immediately involved in this wretched business.” – William Wilberforce May 12th, 1789 before Parliament speaking about the slave trade.

“OAKLAND, California, June 16, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The top pro-life group exposing the racist roots and effects of Planned Parenthood’s abortion strategy has continued its attack with a new video and another billboard campaign, this time in California.

The Issues4Life Foundation and The Radiance Foundation launched the abortion awareness and pro-adoption campaign this week. The initiative has placed sixty billboards throughout Oakland with the message “Black & Beautiful” over the image of a black baby, plus the local website, TooManyAborted.com/CA.

This month marks the anniversary of legalized abortion in California through the Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967, the groups noted in a press release this week. That year, there were 518 legal abortions. Today, California has one of the highest abortion rates in America, with over 214,190 abortions performed each year at 522 abortion facilities.

The CDC reports that the Black abortion rate is over three times that of the majority population – a difference, the groups say, that cannot be explained by “health care disparities.”

“The impact of abortion in the Black Community is the Darfur of America,” stated Walter B. Hoye II, President of the Issues4Life Foundation, citing the 15 million Black American lives that have been aborted since 1973.

Ryan Bomberger, an adoptee and adoptive father, is the co-founder of The Radiance Foundation and is responsible for the creation of the TooManyAborted.Com campaign.

“Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain, is a failure,” said Bomberger. “They haven’t budged the national unintended pregnancy rate since 1995 but are relentlessly dedicated to increasing their annual share of abortions. They heavily advocate a singular ‘choice’ that feeds their $1 billion dollar tax-payer subsidized budget.”

The groups behind the campaign also say they hope to expose Planned Parenthood’s method of bypassing parents to procure secret abortions for young girls in school.

La Verne Tolbert, a former board member of Planned Parenthood turned pro-life activist, said Planned Parenthood’s abortion business in California thrives in part by cooperating with school-based or school-linked family planning clinics.

“Girls are taken off campus to a Planned Parenthood clinic, where abortions are performed without parental consent or notification,” he said.

Public awareness campaigns focusing on Planned Parenthood’s targeting of black pregnancies have gained grassroots momentum across America in recent months.

In March, thirty billboards in South Chicago were erected connecting the black abortion rate to Obama’s image with the words, “Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted.” The campaign was funded by the pro-life group Life Always.

An enormous billboard in New York City declaring the womb “the most dangerous place for an African American” caused an uproar and was taken down two days after it was erected in February.”